“Where are you going, Ma’am?”

She replied to him with some address, but her destination was completely in the middle of the mountains. It’s strange to be in the mountains at this time of night.

Today’s story features a scary story of a taxi driver, originally told by Chihara Junior.

The original story is from Chihara Junior, one of the most famous comedians in Japan. He barely tells ghost stories, but when he sometimes does, he is one of my favourite Kaidan tellers, always delivering fresh scares with his high-level storytelling technique.

This story is the one he heard from a taxi driver who had a scary experience once at night. From here, I will describe “I” as Chihara Junior himself for convenience.

This is the story that I heard from a taxi driver.

One night, he was at his work and driving around in Kobe. It was midnight around 2 am, and the last train already left a while ago. There was almost no one around in the city and the lights were dimmed as well.

Then suddenly, he could see a woman holding up her hand a little further away.

He immediately felt strange. “Why would a woman be standing alone in such a place at such a late night?”

But he couldn’t ignore her, could he? So he pulled over the car in front of the woman and let her in the back seat.

When he saw her look, she was in a white dress, had white skin, and her long black hair covered her face in a way that hid her face.

Do you know about the famous Japanese horror film Ring? There is a grudge character in it called Sadako, who has long, straight black hair and wears a white one-piece dress. You can imagine this woman looks similar to this character.

Anyway, he asked her, “Where are you going, Ma’am?” She replied to him with some address. 

But her destination was completely in the middle of the mountains.

It’s strange to be in the mountains at this time of night… and also her look. That was the time when he was kind of sure of this. “This woman is not a living person.”

If you were a normal person, you would probably be overcome with fear at that point. But he was a man of strong character, so he didn’t worry about it that much and just kept on driving.

He was thinking like, “I know, I know. You mean like when I look in the rear-view mirror, you’re gone, and the seat is all wet or something like that, right?”

With such casually, he was driving to the mountains.

Every few minutes after that, he would check the rear-view mirror.

“Oh, she’s still there. Will she be gone soon?”

After a while, look in the mirror again.

“Is she gone already? Oh, she’s still there.”

He drove on and on, and there was no more road in the navigation system. It’s that deep in the mountains.

He saw the rear-view mirror again. But she was still there.

“Umm, maybe I was wrong about her.”

Finally, he reached the point where he couldn’t go any further by car. And that was exactly her destination…

He turned around and was about to talk to the woman again. Then, poof, sure enough, the woman was gone.

He was like, “See? That’s what I’ve been talking about. It’s just another cheap scary story.”

As he was thinking that, “Thank you for finding me…” He heard a voice echo inside his head.

“What?”

He looked back at the front window again and saw that the woman who had just been in the car hanged herself in front of him…

---